Habeas Viscus Quotes

“black studies illuminates the essential role that racializing assemblages play in the construction of modern selfhood, works toward the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human. In doing so, black studies pursues a politics of global liberation beyond the genocidal shackles of Man.3”
― Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

“When June Tyson repeatedly intones, “It's after the end of the world…. Don't you know that yet?” at the beginning of the Sun Ra Arkestra's 1974 film Space Is the Place, she directs our attention to the very real likelihood that another world might not only be possible but that this universe may already be here in the NOW.21 The only question that remains: do we have the tools required to apprehend other worlds such as the one prophesied by June Tyson and Sun Ra, or will we remain infinitely detained by the magical powers of Man's juridical assemblage as a result of having consumed too much of his treacly Kool-Aid?”
― Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

“Man will only be abolished “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” if we disarticulate the modern human (Man) from its twin: racializing assemblages.”
― Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

“[...] white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought. Since the ideas of the Black Panther Party are limited to concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere, they do not register as thought qua thought, and can thus be exploited by and elevated to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving any credit. [Dear reader, if this reminds you of the colonial expropriation of natural resources, you would be neither wrong nor alone in making such an assumption. In the words of Kanye West: that shit cray.]”
― Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

“Racializing assemblages translate the lacerations left on the captive body by apparatuses of political violence to a domain rooted in the visual truth-value accorded
to quasi-biological distinctions between different human groupings. Thus, rather than entering a clearing zone of indistinction, we are thrown into the vortex of hierarchical indicators: racializing assemblages. In the absence of kin, family, gender, belonging, language, personhood, property, and official records, among many other factors, what remains is the flesh, the living, speaking, thinking, feeling, and imagining flesh: the ether that holds together the world of Man while at the same time forming the condition of possibility for this world’s demise. It’s the end of the world — don’t you know that yet?”
― Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human